4 ms·
Microbes are 'active engineers' in Earth's rock-to-life cycle
- shrubble 4y agoIt's weird how the anime Nausicaa, with it's focus on mushrooms and fungi etc. making the earth habitable, seems prescient.
- falseprofit 4y agoWhy prescient? Did it really predate the relevant scientific understanding?
- 082349872349872 4y agocf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite#Fossil_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite#Fossil_record
- mensetmanusman 4y agoThe ‘rock to microbe’ story is even more interesting :)
- DoreenMichele 4y agoMicrobes also started the oxygenation of the atmosphere. Some microbes were off-gassing oxygen. There was a cartoon in one of my college textbooks where some microbes were decrying how their oxygen-producing neighbors were ruining the environment with their high levels of poisonous oxygen off-gassing.
- krisoft 4y agoAbsolutely. It is speculated that the increasing oxygen level caused a mass extinction event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event Change has winners and losers. Microbes who evolved to thrive in an anaerobic environment suffered, us oxygen breathers gained advantage.
- v8xi 4y agoOn this topic, I would highly recommend Nick Lane's Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World. Interesting learning about how life worked different when oxygen was much lower, and much higher than today.
- unlikelymordant 4y agoseems like a good analogy that it's entirely possible for earth's inhabitants to produce so much poisonous waste gas that a new equilibrium is found in which basically none of the original organisms survive and the old status quo never returns. Hopefully CO2 doesn't do anything quite so drastic for humans.
- tomcam 4y agoOther active engineers in the rock-to-life cycle: Fort Minor, The Beatles, Polyphia.
- schiffern 4y agoFor a salient discussion of how biotic cycling can be used in agriculture, microbiologist Elaine Ingham gives a practical talk to audiences of actual farmers.[0] [0] https://youtu.be/x2H60ritjag https://youtu.be/x2H60ritjag
- 6502nerdface 4y agoI really highly recommend Robert Hazen's _Story of Earth_ [1] if you're into this sort of stuff. Highly knowledgeable and entertaining geologist argues that the geosphere and the biosphere should really be viewed as one co-evolving system, over deep time. There are thousands of species of minerals that can only exist because of the action of life, and those minerals in turn enable new forms of life, which enable new species of mineral, and so on in a complex and ever evolving system within which we exist for only a fraction of an instant. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Story-Earth-Billion-Stardust-Living/dp/0143123645/ https://www.amazon.com/Story-Earth-Billion-Stardust-Living/d...
- college_physics 4y agoYou can call it the revenge of the softies. Rock thought it had it all worked out, geometric purity, eternal hardness, high atomic numbers, crushing abundance, first mover advantage. Then comes along Life, a freak aberration, barely indistinguishable from water, chaotic and brittle, ugly and arbitrary in structure, and it starts chewing on the mighty Rock. Fast forward billions of years: the entire volume of the planet (where temperature allows macromolecules to exist) is alive somehow... Rock retreats to the molten interior
- falseprofit 4y agoRocks get chewed on by literally anything. Air, water, and yes, microbes.
- college_physics 4y agoI said, "Rock, what's a matter with you, Rock?"
- blamazon 4y agoAnd now we've dragged Rock forwards, kicking and screaming, as we animated it and are earnestly teaching it to think. (Silicon and derived semiconductors)
- college_physics 4y ago> (Silicon and derived semiconductors) who is afraid of monolith monsters? [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monolith_Monsters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monolith_Monsters
- roughly 4y agoWe’ve even ejected it into space, literally exiling it from the planet it was born to!